God works in strange ways.
I am sure you have heard and used that little phrase……
But – doesn’t he!
We use it to describe situations in which good things somehow and surprisingly result from seemingly unimportant, inadequate, incoherent or erroneous decisions or actions.
My nephew Matt and I were reflecting on this the other night.
Had Gail not encouraged me, 23 years ago, to accept a call to Christ Church in Bradenton, Florida a geographic location like purgatory or hell for which I had no intent of ever visiting much less living!
Fr. Robinson of Church of the Redeemer fame would never have known me and thus wouldn’t have invited a low-church evangelical charismatic to be his assistant and enter a strange new and exotic liturgical world which I thought would be short lived but ended up being almost a 20 year visit.
If all that had not occurred, my nephew would never have come to Florida, he would not have lived with us here for a time, got involved in a church where Jesus got a hold of him.
He would never have met his wife, Laura; their discovering each other, each in their final attempt to find a potential Christian relationship via an online dating service, which led in a year’s time to their engagement, marriage, and then to their little girl Lily, who is one of the greatest blessings we have ever experienced in our lives.
Do I see God’s hand in all of that? You bet I do. God answered a prayer, in a strange way indeed. We were never able to have kids but we have a grand-niece who feels like a grandchild.
I heard a pastor one time talking about being a grandparent. He said grandchildren are God’s blessings to the grandparents for not killing their own kids when they were teenagers! We received the blessing without the trials of parenthood.
God does work in strange ways. Some of you might have experienced that in your own lives – that which seemingly is accidental, or inconsequential, or seemingly ill-considered, ends up, in time, becoming a great blessing.
I believe it to be true that if we are being open to God, if we have submitted our will to his will, he can use all of our lives with all of our experiences, regardless of how we understand them, to eventually bless us and use us to bless others as he works out his plans.
That’s God’s sovereignty; he is working even when we don’t recognize it, to accomplish his will for his purposes even when we don’t know those purposes when we trust him and are open to him.
That is the point that Matthew I think is making in the Gospel lesson this morning.
Matthew gives account of the birth of Jesus through the eyes of Joseph with emphasis that God himself is doing a unique work using faithful people willing to undergo difficult situations.
Neither agent sees the whole picture. They don’t grasp the entirety of God’s plan but they know he has involved them, and they are willing.
Matthew doesn’t give us much about Mary’s perspective.
Luke does, though. Luke tells of a young girl of common origins, a girl of faith and religious learning who when called to an extraordinary and difficult ministry by an angel, to be the mother of the son of God, responds with faith: “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.”
Matthew introduces her and her situation only briefly as it relates to Joseph: She is betrothed to an older fellow, a carpenter or builder by trade.
Betrothal was a serious business. It meant that they were already pledged to one another before witnesses. All that remained was a public ceremony and the consummation of the marriage.
But Joseph finds her to be already pregnant, a violation of the betrothal, considered to be adultery.
Matthew tells us that Joseph is a just man, a righteous man, one who seeks to be right with God; he is a man of faith. And we can only imagine Joseph’s disappointment with Mary, his broken heart over her supposed infidelity, his own injured pride, his future hopes and dreams of children and family up in smoke. How could God work through this?
And yet we find he is a merciful man. As he seeks to extricate himself from this embarrassing and demeaning situation he refuses to expose Mary to the full ramification of the law. He seeks to quietly let this go, to protect Mary as far as he is able.
In the midst of this moral and emotional chaos God meets Joseph in a dream, where he discovers that this chaos is all according to plan! Not his plan, but God’s plan.
An angel appears to him addressing him as a son of David, a title of significance for the Jewish people.
Immediately prior to today’s reading Matthew presents a genealogy, the ancestral line of Joseph, which accomplishes three things:
It first connects Abraham the father of Israel to Joseph so any descendant of Joseph, be they blood or adopted, are understood to be sons of Abraham, the father of Israel, the ultimate man of faith who God called to move from his home country, “not knowing whither he went” (Heb. 11:8), trusting implicitly the God who had called him to an unknown future.
Joseph’s descendants thus become inheritors of God’s promise to Abraham that: I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”(Gen 12.3-4)
And: “In your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed, because you have obeyed my voice” (Gen 22.18).
Joseph and his descendants become an integral part of the Abrahamic covenant, the timeless commitment of faith in God’s promise that God would ultimately bless the world through his descendants.
Secondly his genealogy makes that connection through King David, described in scripture as a man after God’s own heart, through whose line would come the expected messiah, Israel’s savior and deliverer as proclaimed by the prophet Samuel:
I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son.” 2 Sam 7.12-14.
And:
I have sworn to David my servant:
‘I will establish your offspring forever,
and build your throne for all generations. (Psalm 89: 3-4).
Son of David, son of Abraham, as Abraham was the first from whose family it was predicted that the Messiah should spring (Gen. 22:18), so David was the last. To a Jewish reader, these are the two points of any true genealogy of the promised Messiah.
Lastly, though the genealogy is not comprehensive (it doesn’t include everyone in the ancestral line) it does include king and commoner, saint and sinner, male and female, Jew and Gentile. All of humanity’s conditions, it might be said, are represented in the ancestry of the Messiah. The work of Israel’s expected savior thus would apprehend all of humanity.
The angel tells him not to be afraid to marry Mary. God encourages him that though he is in this difficult situation and he doesn’t totally comprehend what God is doing, like Abraham and David before him he must trust God. Because that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Spirit; this child is no ordinary child but is of the nature of God himself in Mary’s womb.
The angel instructs: She will bear a son and you shall call his name Jesus, the Greek interpretation of the Hebrew: Jeshua, or Joshua, which means God saves.
As it is traditional that the father name his child, Joseph is commanded to give this child the name his true father God has chosen: God saves because it will be his life purpose to fulfill God’s plan, to save his people from their sins.”
Matthew then makes a striking comment on this event that it is a fulfillment of prophecy recorded in Isaiah: “Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel”.
A name that means: God with us. This child is to be God’s person in our midst. God Incarnate made flesh as one of us, who is to save mankind from their sin.
Matthew’s closing comment in this account goes to describe the nature of Joseph as a man of faith. “When Joseph woke from sleep, he did as the Angel of the Lord commanded him: He took his wife, but knew her not until she had given birth to a son. And he called his name Jesus.
Joseph trusted. He acted out of faith. He did what God wanted, regardless how he felt, regardless of what it cost him; and Mary the same.
From that faithfulness of common folk, the promise made to Abraham thousands of years prior to be a blessing to all nations is fulfilled;
the promise that a son of King David would reign as God’s son is fulfilled.
Isaiah’s prophecy that a child would be born of a virgin who would be God Incarnate with his people, is fulfilled.
God’s plan, worked through the millennia to redeem the world from sin, is accomplished in Jesus.
And we as Christians are inheritors of that blessing of salvation, a blessing given to us by God, through the faithful living of common people in a variety of surprising and seemingly strange life circumstances.
As inheritors of that blessing of salvation, as children adopted into that ancestral line of faith, are we likewise willing to be open to what God wants to do in our lives: To set our plans, our wishes, our desires aside to be obedient to his will?
Are we willing to be a part of God’s plan in the world today: To make Jesus, God saves, God with us, known by all?
God does work in strange ways, especially in the lives of those who trust him. May we discover the blessing of trusting Jesus enough that our lives might be a blessing to him and fulfill his purposes in our world. May we find the Lord Jesus working in strange ways, for his purposes in our lives.
Sermon preached by the Reverend Richard C. Marsden
The church of the Redeemer
Sarasota, FL
4th Sunday of Advent
22 December 2013